Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Is any detail too trivial to record?

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I’ve been working on processing my backlog of newspaper articles that I downloaded during my burst of newspaper research in June and July. I don’t know about you, but when I’m doing newspaper research (or, really, any genealogy research), it can be tempting not to go to the trouble of downloading everything I find because it doesn’t seem important enough. And when I’m in the midst of a research session sometimes the downloading (or printing or copying, if I’m actually looking at paper documents) can seem so tedious that I only bother with the big stuff.

Come to think about it, that’s one advantage of short, frequent research sessions that I should add to my post The value of daily research. Since I don’t get bleary-eyed or weary during short sessions, I’m more likely to make the effort to download everything.

In any case, this week, as I was processing some newspaper articles, I was so happy that I had taken the effort to download even the tiniest articles. For example, there was an article in The Clinton Eye of Clinton, Henry, Missouri about my grandmother, Susie Jeffries Brown (1907-1999), having her tonsils and adenoids out on August 26, 1919. I didn’t think much of it when I downloaded it, but as I processed it, I noticed that the surgery took place 50 miles from her home in Rockville, Bates, Missouri and that it happened two days after her twelfth birthday.

I paused to think about whether 12-year-old Susie might have spent her birthday full of trepidation about the surgery and I wondered how long she stayed in the hospital. Was she served ice cream? (That always seemed to be the best part of getting your tonsils out when I was a kid.) It prompted me to do a little more research and I learned that by 1919 tonsillectomies were growing more prevalent (in fact hers was one of three mentioned in the newspaper article!), though they exploded in popularity in the 1920s. (If you’re as big a nerd as me and feel like digging into the topic, you can read The Rise and Decline of Tonsillectomies from The Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (vol. 62, No. 4, October 2007) at JSTOR.)

I was lucky enough to have known my grandmother, who died in her 90s when I was in my 30s. But I almost always think of her as a senior citizen. Sometimes I think of her as a  mother of young children, as I recall stories my mother told me about her childhood. But I don’t know much about my grandmother’s childhood, mostly because I was lousy listener as a kid and young adult.

So this little newspaper article added to my understanding of my grandmother’s childhood and, perhaps more importantly, gave me reason to think about her as a child.

Whenever I’m tempted to skip downloading something, I’m going to remember that trivial things can often provide great clues when taken together with other clues found over time. That makes them important to capture. But even when they’re truly trivial, they can provide valuable little insights.

Amy Johnson Crow’s WANDER method for genealogy

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If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you know I’m a fan of Amy Johnson Crow. She was one of my first How They Do It interviewees. She’s interviewed me for her podcast a couple of times. She’s one of my favorite genealogy speakers. And we like hanging out at conferences.

When I read her first blog post/podcast episode about her WANDER method, her description of the genealogy research process, I was really impressed. First of all, coming up with a viable acronym isn’t easy. And it so succinctly describes a really smart way to think about the research process.

WANDER means:

Amy creates a blog post from each episode of her podcast, so you have two ways to consume her information. You can read about it or listen to it. (These links give you access to both media.) She first described the WANDER method in this post, called The Genealogy Research Process: The WANDER Method, which provides a general overview. And then she goes in-depth into each step in subsequent posts/episodes. I’ve linked to those episodes above, in the bullet points. As of this writing, Evaluate Everything is her most recent post. I couldn’t wait for the final one before writing about it here!

I encourage you to read and/or listen to these posts/episodes for inspiration for doing some solid research. (She offers a printable method to remember the steps on the overview post!)

August 30 x 30 challenge: Who’s with me?

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I’m in dire need of a new 30 x 30 challenge. I was able to prioritize genealogy research during the June 30 x 30 challenge, but in July, without the accountability of the challenge, I think I did genealogy fewer than half the days.

The COVID crisis is escalating here in Missouri and I’m staying in more than ever. So it seems to me that August is the perfect time for a new 30 x 30 challenge. In August, I hope to get rid of my backlog of unprocessed downloaded documents or at least make a huge dent in it. I’m going to try to be really focused on that. And I vow that if I do download new documents, I will process them the same session I download them.

Are you interested in joining me in committing to doing 30 minutes of genealogy research (or organizing or whatever else you want to do) for 30 days? If so, please post a comment!

Quick Tip #3: Use standard date format

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Here’s the next in my series of bite-size Quick Tips. Click on the Quick Tips tag for my other Quick Tips. Because I tend to write longer posts, I wanted to provide a quick-to-read (and quick-to-write) high-impact post every couple of weeks. This one has become second nature to me, even when I’m not doing genealogy!

Use standard genealogy formatting when writing dates

If you’ve been doing genealogy awhile, you’re probably already doing this, but for newer genealogists, I suggest using a standard date format for your genealogy dates to avoid confusion. Here’s my understanding of the accepted format:

Day of the month expressed in one or two digits, followed by the three-letter abbreviation for the month and then the year, expressed in four digits. (DD MMM YYYY). Note the absence of a comma or slashes.

So my mother’s birthday, which she probably wrote most often as May 2, 1933, is expressed 2 May 1933 in my genealogy software.

Using a standardized format eliminates some of the guess work for people who look at your data. Most U.S. folks are accustomed to writing dates like this: MM-DD-YY (7-10-20). But people in many other countries tend to put the day of the month first, as in DD-MM-YY (10-07-20). Using letters for the month eliminates confusion. And it’s essential to use all four years of the date because we genealogists are working in multiple centuries.

This is an easy habit to get into with repetition. And it’s well worth it, in my opinion!

 

Photo by Sam Dan Truong on Unsplash